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For some time now Jens Rehsack (‎Sno‎), H.Merijn Brand (‎Tux‎) and I have been working on bootstrapping a large project to provide a common test suite for the DBI that can be reused by drivers to test their conformance to the DBI specification.

This post isn’t about that. This post is about two spin-off modules that might seem unrelated: Data::Tumbler and Test::WriteVariants, and the Perl QA Hackathon that saw them released.

At the heart of one of our major web applications at TigerLead is a property listing search. The search supports all the obvious criteria, like price range and bedrooms, more complex ones like school districts, plus a “full-text” search field.

This is the story of moving the property listing search logic from querying a PostgreSQL instance to querying an ElasticSearch cluster. Continue reading →

As soon as I saw a Flame Graph visualization I knew it would make a great addition to NYTProf. So I’m delighted that the new Devel::NYTProf version 5.00, just released, has a Flame Graph as the main feature of the index page.

In this post I’ll explain the Flame Graph visualization, the new ‘subroutine calls event stream’ that makes the Flame Graph possible, and other recent changes, including improved precision in the subroutine profiler. Continue reading →

For a long time I’ve wanted to create a module that would shed light on how perl uses memory. This year I decided to do something about it.

My research and development didn’t yield much fruit in time for OSCON in July, where my talk ended up being about my research and plans. (I also tried to explain that RSS isn’t a useful measurement for this, and that malloc buffering means even total process size isn’t a very useful measurement.) I was invited to speak at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo in September and really wanted to have something worthwhile to demonstrate there.

I’m delighted to say that some frantic hacking (aka Conference Driven Development) yielded a working demo just in time and, after a little more polish, I’ve now uploaded Devel::SizeMe to CPAN.

This is the text of a speech I originally wrote for the International Speech Competition at my Toastmasters club in April 2012. (I won the club competition and came second in the area competition a week or so later.)

In July I gave a slightly modified version, reproduced here, as a 5 minute Lightning Talk at OSCON in Portland OR. Continue reading →